Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
-
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
-
A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
-
It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
-
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.
-
It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.
-
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
-
What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.
-
Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
-
I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?
-
But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.
-
... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.
-
Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.
-
If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
-
We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.
-
I will go down with my colours flying.
-
To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.
-
I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.
-
Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.
-
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
-
But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
-
...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
-
The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.
-
[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.